An unprecedented product recommendation – does your laptop get a bit hot?

My laptop has been getting very hot in recent months. I’d not worried about it TOO much until the other day when it got so hot underneath that it left a heat mark where it had hardened the wax on one of my partner’s precious French dining tables.

I’ve been using a can of compressed air to blast the fan from time-to-time, but that only lasts a few days before the machine gets hot again.

So, I decided to explore and see if there were alternatives. It seems that this is a slightly problematic laptop for this phenomenon anyway. Overheating is also a problem for gamers, so there’s various gadgets to address it. Most of these are gel pads, though there are also some pads with several very flat fans in them to cool the whole base.

The reviews of these weren’t entirely positive, so I looked a bit further. Then I came across a thing called an OPOLAR. It’s a more powerful (but comparatively quiet) fan that automatically senses the air temperature coming from the usual outlet and switches itself on and off to reduce this temperature. It means that my laptop is permanently cool.

There are two advantages to this: no more damage to expensive tables and, apparently, the processor works faster. It’s hard to measure this, but I have noticed that my photo-processing software, Lightroom, is no longer running out of memory, which I suspect is related as Windows will try to compensate for slow processor performance with more memory being allocated to the core task.

Wow! Have just heard that the Oxford University Group Coaching Course 2018 has been sold out seven weeks ahead. Really looking forward to meeting the delegates and having a great time working together. (conted.ox.ac.uk/cour…) #oxgroupcoach